New Office Add-ins STAMP and DAISY Released by Microsoft

If you are using Microsoft Office 2010 in your system then there are some new add-ins released by Microsoft for you. Add-ins are very important as they can improve the product performance and reduce the effort in doing certain things.

The two Add-ins that were released by Microsoft recently are called STAMP and DAISY which we shall discuss one by one.

The Subtitling text add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint lets you add closed captions to the video and audio files you include in your presentations. If you work with captioned video and audio files that already have Timed Text Markup (TTML) files associated with them, this add-in lets you import them directly into your presentation. If you don’t have a TTML file, you can add captions directly in your presentation.

The STAMP add-in allows you to do the following:

• Import captions from a Timed Text Markup (TTML) file to create captions against an audio or video in the presentation.
• Create and edit closed captions in PowerPoint 2010.
• Delete your closed captions.
• Turn captions on and off when in presentation mode. Viewers who have this add-in installed can do this also.
• Use a video/audio playback while editing Timed Text captions.
• Align captions when they have moved, or if you re-size the video.
• Import communicative text formatting information from the TTML file, for example: styling, color and alignment.

The Open XML to DAISY XML Translator add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2010 helps content creators produce accessible documents for people who have visual disabilities. Installing this add-in allows Word documents in Open XML format to be saved into DAISY XML, which can then be converted into DAISY Digital Talking Book (DTB) format.